To a lot of students starting out, F‐stops are very mysterious and take a little bit of time to understand. So what is an F-stop? The F-Stop controls two things. First is how much light is allowed to enter the lens to take your picture – your exposure. The second thing it controls is your…

There’s many food bloggers out there who always shoot in one of the “automatic” camera modes. I get told this in class all the time. I’m going to break down each of the modes here so you can understand what the camera is doing in each one. Different cameras might not have all these modes…

Now that we have gone over the three crucial camera settings used to achieve the proper exposure, f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO, we need to talk about how they work together. To start I’m only going to address f-stops and shutter speeds first. I will address the third component ISO in another post The…

ISO is the third setting that you need to know about in order to get a correct exposure. I’ve already addressed the other two – f-stop and shutter speed in these posts. As I’ve mentioned before the perfect exposure is a combination of these three settings, f-stop, shutter speed and ISO. ISO stands for International…

Getting the perfect exposure is challenging for most students who take my classes. Often they are setting their camera to one of the “auto” exposure camera settings (AV, TV, Program, Fully Auto, etc) and just crossing their fingers that this setting works in getting them a good exposure. I want you to be able to…

I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking me to walk them through starting a food shot. Please keep in mind what I say here is really just my way of doing things. The shot I am using as an example has very few props in it and its simply a shot of the strawberries…

Hi there! I'm Christina Peters, food photographer, teacher, and blogger. I live in LA, shoot anywhere and I love all things food. I've been shooting professionally for more than 25 years and I also teach food photography classes. I blog about photography tips and tricks. I also crave Maryland crab cakes daily. Read More…